Cited by 48Mobile Crowdsensing and CrowdsourcingExpert finding and Q&A systemsMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

CrowdVerge: Predicting If People Will Agree on the Answer to a Visual Question

Open access
Gurari, Danna, Grauman, Kristen·2017·Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Abstract

Visual question answering systems empower users to ask any question about any image and receive a valid answer. However, existing systems do not yet account for the fact that a visual question can lead to a single answer or multiple different answers. While a crowd often agrees, disagreements do arise for many reasons including that visual questions are ambiguous, subjective, or difficult. We propose a model, CrowdVerge, for automatically predicting from a visual question whether a crowd would agree on one answer. We then propose how to exploit these predictions in a novel application to efficiently collect all valid answers to visual questions. Specifically, we solicit fewer human responses when answer agreement is expected and more human responses otherwise. Experiments on 121,811 visual questions asked by sighted and blind people show that, compared to existing crowdsourcing systems, our system captures the same answer diversity with typically 14-23% less crowd involvement.

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  • Annotation by crowdworkers without disability-specific expertise leads to inconsistent or inaccurate labels in accessibility datasets.

    “leading to inconsistent or inaccurate labels.”

    From Disability-First AI Dataset Annotation: Co-designing Stuttered Speech Annotation Guidelines with People Who Stutter (2026) · cites this paper as [35]

    The Answer (Dis)Agreements section says crowdworkers can disagree when a task requires domain expertise or a worker answers inadequately. The Answers section confirms that the paper collected crowdworker answers for VizWiz questions asked by blind users. It does not establish that a lack of disability-specific expertise caused inconsistent or inaccurate labels in accessibility datasets. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Accessibility datasets are often annotated by crowdworkers without disability-specific expertise.

    “accessibility datasets are often annotated by crowdworkers without disability-specific expertise, leading to inconsistent or inaccurate labels.”

    From Disability-First AI Dataset Annotation: Co-designing Stuttered Speech Annotation Guidelines with People Who Stutter (2026) · cites this paper as [35]

    The VizWiz section describes visual questions asked by blind users, and the Answer (Dis)Agreements section reports that crowd-worker mistakes or a need for domain expertise can cause disagreement. The paper does not say that accessibility datasets are often annotated by workers lacking disability-specific expertise, or that this lack causes inaccurate labels. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • VizWiz had only 9% unanimous agreement among annotators on the answer to associated visual questions.

    “only 9% unanimous agreement among annotators on the answer to associated visual questions [35]”

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1 of the 37 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. K. Hara, J. Sun, R. Moore, D. Jacobs, and J. Froehlich. 2014. Tohme: Detecting Curb Ramps in Google Street View Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning. In ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST). 189-204.
  2. G. Laput, W. S. Lasecki, J. Wiese, R. Xiao, J. P. Bigham, and C. Harrison. 2015. Zensors: Adaptive, Rapidly Deployable, Human-Intelligent Sensor Feeds. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 1935-1944.
  3. M. Malinowski and M. Fritz. 2014. A Multi-World Approach to Question Answering about Real-World Scenes based on Uncertain Input. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). 1682-1690.
  4. Y. Zhong, W. S. Lasecki, E. Brady, and J. P. Bigham. 2015. Regionspeak: Quick comprehensive spatial descriptions of complex images for blind users. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2353-2362.

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Authors
Gurari, D., & Grauman, K.
Affiliations
The University of Texas at Austin (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
ACM
Published
2017-05-02
Pages
3511-3522
OpenAlex
W2610525153
Cited by
45
References
37
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 8
FWCI
6.05
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • Office of Naval Research (YIP N00014-12-1-0754)
  • National Science Foundation (IIS-1065390)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Expert finding and Q&A systems
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
visual question answering, crowdsourcing, blind users, visual ambiguity

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